Further Reading

Sony's PlayStation Now service, which will start by letting players stream a selection of PlayStation 3 games on their PlayStation 4, won't be in open beta until the end of July. The service is in closed beta right now, though, and Sony's initial pricing experiments for the service have begun to leak out. The prices are, as Kotaku bluntly put it, "currently insane." Sony is charging up to $5 for a four-hour rental period and up to $30 for 90 days of access to a game like Final Fantasy XIII-2, a game that sells new for roughly half that price on disc. A game like Guacamelee costs $15 for either a 90-day rental or a full download on PSN.

It's important to note that these prices aren't final and could easily change by the time PS Now launches in open beta or afterward. It's also important to note that Sony has mentioned some sort of subscription plan for PlayStation Now, which would presumably provide Netflix-style all-you-could-play access for some sort of monthly fee. That would seem much easier to stomach than à la carte streaming game rentals, depending on the specific price Sony charges.

Looking at PlayStation Now pricing as it currently stands, though, we're beginning to think that the problem isn't the prices themselves but the whole idea of renting out streaming games for limited real-world time spans.

Time-limited rentals for downloaded and/or streamed content can work quite well for TV shows and movies, as iTunes and similar services have shown. That's because these forms of entertainment are offered as discrete entertainment units of anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, comprising a more-or-less self-contained story. With a rented movie or TV show, you can be relatively sure you'll be done with the experience when you've watched it once in the 24-hour rental period (or, if it's the kind of work you expect to watch multiple times, you can buy it).

Games aren't like that. A paid, four-hour rental for a game like Final Fantasy XIII-2 is not the same type of entertainment unit as a $5 rental for an HD iTunes movie. While you'd be able to get the complete movie experience in a time window that short, you'd only be done with about 1/7th of the "main story" in Final Fantasy XIII-2 during a rental of the same time. In general, there are very few games that can be fully appreciated in a mere four hours these days, and the ones that can are generally sold new for less-than-premium prices. For most games, a four-hour rental is no better than a demo, and in a day and age where publishers are giving away unrestricted 48-hour demos of complete games for free, charging for such a demo is a non-starter.

PlayStation Now also offers longer rental periods, which at least allow enough time to theoretically get through even longer games in their entirety. Renting a streaming game for seven days at a price of $6 to $8 is comparable to game rental offerings at brick-and-mortar outlets like the now-defunct Blockbuster Video. Back in the pre-broadband days, I was more than happy to use my limited allowance money for an extended tryout on games I couldn't afford to pay full price for. The whole concept seems a bit antiquated now, though, born of a scarcity of rentable game cartridges and discs that simply doesn't exist in the realm of Internet streaming (not to mention the ridiculous overhead of maintaining a real-world storefront and storing/shipping rental inventory). Times and the market have changed, but the basic rental model Sony is proposing hasn't.

A metered solution

The problem with time-limited game rentals, in general, is that they come with a built-in pressure for players to maximize their value by playing the game as much as possible in that limited time period. If you get home from work and feel like doing something else with your entertainment free time—watch a movie, read a book, take a bath, whatever—you're essentially wasting the limited amount of time you have to enjoy your rental. This may not be a huge deal if you've bought a seven-day rental of a game that can be finished in ten hours, but if you are grinding your way through an epic game in a short time period, renting makes the experience feel like a job with a tight deadline.

Back in the days of brick-and-mortar rental stores, this was pretty much the only workable system, since you eventually had to return the game so somebody else could rent it (though even Blockbuster experimented with an odd "no late fees" structure near the end of its life). In the digital realm, artificially limiting streaming game rentals in real time makes no sense except as an artifact of that bygone era.

If Sony is wedded to the idea of charging for individual rentals on PlayStation Now (rather than full-access subscriptions or some sort of licensed streaming "ownership" system), it should leverage the power of the Internet and charge based on play time, not real time. Players could buy packs of "PS Now credit" that could be used on any game in the library at any point. Credits would only be spent when you're actively playing a game, meaning you don't have to worry about "wasting" a paid rental period by enjoying some other form of entertainment (or, you know, going to work).

Based on the current leaks, Sony is charging between $3 and $5 for four hours of gameplay on PlayStation Now. Let's average that out to $1/hour and translate it into the metered credit scheme. So the $60 you would normally spend on a new AAA game would now translate into 60 hours of title-agnostic streaming gameplay. It would be nice if you got some bonus for buying time in bulk or got a better hourly rate for playing older legacy titles, but for now let's stick with the $1/hour that Sony has already proven it's willing to charge for its streaming service.

Suddenly, the pricing seems a little more reasonable, at least in some situations. Under the credit system, playing through the six to 10 hours it takes to beat a game like Guacamelee would only cost $6 to $10 (or less). That's a bit less than it would cost if you wanted to download the game outright for $15. The 13-hour average to get to 100% completion comes out a little cheaper under the time-credit method, too, even under Sony's current "insane" rates. And unless you're planning on playing the game again after it's complete, you've pretty much gotten the same experience as if you'd bought it.

The main thing differentiating metered time credits from the current rental scheme is the added flexibility. Under this system, if you try a game and find you don't like it after an hour or two, you can abandon it and only be out a couple of bucks for the privilege of trying it. If you want to put a game aside temporarily because life or other entertainment options get in the way, you're not wasting money put toward a pre-paid rental period. If you beat the main portion of a game and decide you want to come back and get 100% completion weeks or months later, you could do so without worrying if a real-time rental period had expired.

There are plenty of situations where this system wouldn't pay off for consumers, of course. Epic RPGs and online multiplayer games where you can expect to put in 100 hours or more would quickly break the bank at per-hour metered rates. Older titles that are going for less than $10 at GameStop or in the PSN bargain bin are probably more efficient to buy outright than to invest in through streaming time as well (though Sony could charge bargain-basement hourly rates for such games if it wanted to make them more attractive). Some players will still want to pay extra to buy a game outright, so they have the option to play at will forever without worrying about being charged for game time.

For the average single-player game that lasts five to 20 hours, though, even paying up to $1 per hour isn't all that unreasonable, especially for relatively recent titles. And to reiterate, this is the worst of the "insane" prices that Sony is already charging for its four-hour rentals during the PlayStation Now beta—larger time purchases or less in-demand titles would hopefully come with better per-hour rates.

The pricing and game selection particulars would matter quite a bit if Sony were to start offering metered, per-hour rates for PlayStation Now streaming, of course, as would the quality of the streaming gameplay experience. An all-you-can-play Netflix-style subscription is probably simpler and more workable, in any case. Still, if Sony wants to stick with an à la carte rental pricing for its streaming service, it would be much more workable if players were put in control of when that game time was spent rather than being subjected to an ever-ticking real-world clock.

Promoted Comments

A rental that allowed me to pay for time used? Definitely interested. Something tied to calendar days? Not so much. I don't want to feel like I'm wasting money because I go to work or out for a ride instead of playing the game I rented.

Time is a bad meter because different games demand different levels of commitment. I finished Hotline Miami in less than 2 hours. It is a great game, but it is very short too. A player who spends 4 hours on a Final Fantasy game has barely scratched the surface of the experience, though.

It does seem like a tricky problem to solve, since there's so much variability in the time games take to finish and the way different people allocate their playtime. Any single solution I think of ends up having some game+usage cases where the price becomes exorbitant.

They will probably need to provide several different options. - Pay per hour - Pay for some number of days or weeks - Monthly subscription to the whole service - Some combinations of the above

The average price that someone pays to stream a game should be targeted lower than the retail price of the game. First, of course, because you won't own the game. Second, because unless they've developed some kind of magical latency-conquering technology, streaming will be an inferior experience.

24 posts | registered Feb 15, 2011

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

126 Reader Comments

Paying a heavy price like this will spell doom fast for the service. I just wonder how are they going to find a sweet spot it might not be a perfect experience but it is compelling though it is far more expensive than buying the games in most cases. I suspect gamers will want this for dirt cheap or a reasonable fixed monthly/annual subscription that gives access to the whole library.

People seem to be missing a pretty major point about PlayStation Now's current pricing: it's explicitly stated as stand in pricing. Final pricing will be set by the publisher just like it is everywhere else in Sony's ecosystem. They just threw something together to allow for testing of the rental side of their transaction system.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

Also, metered (per hour) pricing seems horrible. I wouldn't subscribe to stuff like netflix or crunchyroll if I had to pay $1 per hour, like you're suggesting. Each time I would log onto the service I would be worried that I'm spending too much time on it, and that doesn't seem like fun.

People seem to be missing a pretty major point about PlayStation Now's current pricing: it's explicitly stated as stand in pricing. Final pricing will be set by the publisher just like it is everywhere else in Sony's ecosystem. They just threw something together to allow for testing of the rental side of their transaction system.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

"Stand in pricing" is a bit misleading, beta testers have to pay those prices right now so it is a reality not a might happen scenario until they actually tone it down.

Also, metered (per hour) pricing seems horrible. I wouldn't subscribe to stuff like netflix or crunchyroll if I had to pay $1 per hour, like you're suggesting. Each time I would log onto the service I would be worried that I'm spending too much time on it, and that doesn't seem like fun.

The Netflix model would be awesome here. Say $10 or $20 a month for unlimited play. They'd still make a killing. The people who use it very little would subsidize the heavy players.

People seem to be missing a pretty major point about PlayStation Now's current pricing: it's explicitly stated as stand in pricing. Final pricing will be set by the publisher just like it is everywhere else in Sony's ecosystem. They just threw something together to allow for testing of the rental side of their transaction system.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

"Stand in pricing" is a bit misleading, beta testers have to pay those prices right now so it is a reality not a might happen scenario until they actually tone it down.

in this day and age beta testing means impulsively challenged people who are willing to pay anything to play the newest hyped game

What if you already own the PS3 disc, you pop it in the PS4, software validates the game disc and then charges you only $1 or so to stream it. A PS4 can easily read the data on a PS3 disc, it just can't run the software with it's hardware configuration.

If they did that I wouldn't have as much trouble accepting the streaming charges for games you don't already own, and it would make up for them not being able to make the PS4 backwards compatible.

(I don't know if it's possible but if each disc had some unique identifier in the data Sony's servers could automatically reject that disc from being used in the streaming process again also.)

A rental that allowed me to pay for time used? Definitely interested. Something tied to calendar days? Not so much. I don't want to feel like I'm wasting money because I go to work or out for a ride instead of playing the game I rented.

Also, metered (per hour) pricing seems horrible. I wouldn't subscribe to stuff like netflix or crunchyroll if I had to pay $1 per hour, like you're suggesting. Each time I would log onto the service I would be worried that I'm spending too much time on it, and that doesn't seem like fun.

The Netflix model would be awesome here. Say $10 or $20 a month for unlimited play. They'd still make a killing. The people who use it very little would subsidize the heavy players.

I think this will happen. New games will not be on PSNow (you'll need to pay full price), but older games (like 6 months old) will be available for a netflix-style subscription. It works for movies, and it should work for games too.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

Why? Gamefly let me play hundreds of games for pennies on the dollar. 2 games out at a time for $20/mo - no late fees. That lets you run through quite a few of those lame first and third person games that take 8-10 hours at best. All without plunking down $60 for the game. Also lets you try out games you're unsure of without any fear of getting stuck with a turd. For the games you wanted to buy, I was purchasing titles like Uncharted and Infamous brand new from Gamefly for $40. It's not like Gamefly isn't stocking the latest generation stuff, either.

What's the incentive to move to this digital format if it only offers me a way to spend more money with less overall actual value? It's the reason I have so few digital PSN games. Even with Plus, unless there was a sale on a specific game (or it was a freebie with Plus), you usually ended up paying the same amount or more for the digital version over a retail physical copy ( more so for older games), and the digital version can't be resold or lent.

People seem to be missing a pretty major point about PlayStation Now's current pricing: it's explicitly stated as stand in pricing. Final pricing will be set by the publisher just like it is everywhere else in Sony's ecosystem. They just threw something together to allow for testing of the rental side of their transaction system.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

"Stand in pricing" is a bit misleading, beta testers have to pay those prices right now so it is a reality not a might happen scenario until they actually tone it down.

What would be a more accurate way to describe pricing that is explicitly not final and is only in place temporarily while testing of a payment system is being done?

Time is a bad meter because different games demand different levels of commitment. I finished Hotline Miami in less than 2 hours. It is a great game, but it is very short too. A player who spends 4 hours on a Final Fantasy game has barely scratched the surface of the experience, though.

I think metered payment plans are completely absent from the gaming industry, but sorely needed. I would like to play certain MMOs but I don't care to pay the monthly fee. I simply don't have the time to make it worthwhile. Some people do, and those monthly fees make sense for them. For me, it just prevents me from even bothering with those models.

The same thing happened with Gamefly. I worked the numbers and it turned out it was cheaper for me to buy used games than pay a subscription for rentals. This is because my adult responsibilities (job, wife, house, kids, etc) get in the way of the substantial gaming time I used to have.

This pricing threat that Sony is doing is a big turnoff to console gaming for me. I'm far more likely to invest in PC gaming where sales are frequent and competition between ecosystems is highly active.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

Why? Gamefly let me play hundreds of games for pennies on the dollar. 2 games out at a time for $20/mo - no late fees. That lets you run through quite a few of those lame first and third person games that take 8-10 hours at best. All without plunking down $60 for the game. Also lets you try out games you're unsure of without any fear of getting stuck with a turd. For the games you wanted to buy, I was purchasing titles like Uncharted and Infamous brand new from Gamefly for $40. It's not like Gamefly isn't stocking the latest generation stuff, either.

Gamefly is sending you a physical copy and that is what you are renting. Legally speaking, it is a completely different scenario from a digital environment. You're comparing apples and oranges and wondering why one isn't as citrusy as the other.

I posted many times elsewhere that it really pisses me off that Sony won't allow owned PS3 games to be streamed for free, especially those that I bought from the PS Store.

They built custom PS3 hardware specifically to stream games and have to pay the bandwidth for it. So you want them to do this for free?

I have no idea why your being downvoted. The cost of the back-end and bandwidth needs to be covered by the subscribers, regardless of method. While they do not need to charge the IP, the hardware and bandwidth are not free.

Personally I like the metered idea. I could easily see myself paying for a rolling subscription of say 20 hours a month or something.

Also, metered (per hour) pricing seems horrible. I wouldn't subscribe to stuff like netflix or crunchyroll if I had to pay $1 per hour, like you're suggesting. Each time I would log onto the service I would be worried that I'm spending too much time on it, and that doesn't seem like fun.

The Netflix model would be awesome here. Say $10 or $20 a month for unlimited play. They'd still make a killing. The people who use it very little would subsidize the heavy players.

Yeah, they could call it Playstation ... Additional... no no Playstation Plus! And just to make it seem more worthwhile they could throw in older games for free as long as you subscribe! Wait...

Nopenopenope. Give me a fixed rate subscrition system, like Spotify or Netflix, to play games on demand and I'm sold. Having to track how much credits I have to play a game is not only annoying, it takes the joy of just playing whatever I'm up to at a given moment. There's a reason, for example, I don't have a pre-paid cellular account: I want to be able to use my phone whenever I need it without worrying if I'll be able to make a call. The same should go to this kind of online services.

Not that I agree with the current pricing model, but I wonder how much Sony spent on infrastructure to even make this possible. Streaming a game is not the same as streaming a movie; the movie takes no input from the player and just plays (and thus could buffer everything coming up), whereas games don't work that way.

What if you already own the PS3 disc, you pop it in the PS4, software validates the game disc and then charges you only $1 or so to stream it. A PS4 can easily read the data on a PS3 disc, it just can't run the software with it's hardware configuration.

If they did that I wouldn't have as much trouble accepting the streaming charges for games you don't already own, and it would make up for them not being able to make the PS4 backwards compatible.

(I don't know if it's possible but if each disc had some unique identifier in the data Sony's servers could automatically reject that disc from being used in the streaming process again also.)

That's basically exactly what the XBOX One wanted to do and the internet FREAKED OUT.Games don't have unique serial numbers on them to fascilitate thing on pre-existing units, and you would still need some sort of infrastructure for dealing with used games.

Again, what you suggested is exactly what the XBOX One wanted to do and vocal gamers said no.

A more likely idea is if Sony let you mail in your games, perhaps require the box, and they would add it to your account. Then they could sell the used copy to make some coin. Everyone would be happy. Except GameFly...they aren't going to like this.

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

Why? Gamefly let me play hundreds of games for pennies on the dollar. 2 games out at a time for $20/mo - no late fees. That lets you run through quite a few of those lame first and third person games that take 8-10 hours at best. All without plunking down $60 for the game. Also lets you try out games you're unsure of without any fear of getting stuck with a turd. For the games you wanted to buy, I was purchasing titles like Uncharted and Infamous brand new from Gamefly for $40. It's not like Gamefly isn't stocking the latest generation stuff, either.

Gamefly is sending you a physical copy and that is what you are renting. Legally speaking, it is a completely different scenario from a digital environment. You're comparing apples and oranges and wondering why one isn't as citrusy as the other.

One would think that with scarcity removed from the equation, a digital rental would be less costly than a physical one, not more.

I think Ars has the right idea here. The only resource that even approaches being scarce here is the server time, so the charge should be based on that.

I posted many times elsewhere that it really pisses me off that Sony won't allow owned PS3 games to be streamed for free, especially those that I bought from the PS Store.

They built custom PS3 hardware specifically to stream games and have to pay the bandwidth for it. So you want them to do this for free?

I have no idea why your being downvoted. The cost of the back-end and bandwidth needs to be covered by the subscribers, regardless of method. While they do not need to charge the IP, the hardware and bandwidth are not free.

Personally I like the metered idea. I could easily see myself paying for a rolling subscription of say 20 hours a month or something.

the bandwidth and hosting should be free since i'm already paying my ISP for INTERNET ACCESS to the whole internet

Additionally, shouldn't it be more expensive to rent the game for a huge window of time than to buy it flat out? If you are going to rent something for a month or more, odds are that you'll be better of buying it.

If this was physical media, where you having the copy means it's not available for someone else, then yes it should cost more to rent for a long period of time than to purchase it. But this isn't picking up VHS's at Blockbuster anymore.

If the method of payment was a dollar per hour of play what will happen is game dev's will artificially inflate the play time of the game. Either through difficult collection objectives for that trophy you need to platinum the title or through unskippable cut scenes before things like boss battles. If it takes you 10 tries to beat a boss and there is 10-15 seconds of cut scene the time will start to add up. Not to mention if menu time would be counted. Does having the game open but at the main title/menu screen constitute "playing" the game?

I like the idea of being able to pay to play for a limited amount of time especially if it could be used for multi-player titles if there was a gifting option. Effectively giving you the ability to pay for a friend to play with you for a weekend or something. I just think there are some details that will be hard to work out.

I posted many times elsewhere that it really pisses me off that Sony won't allow owned PS3 games to be streamed for free, especially those that I bought from the PS Store.

They built custom PS3 hardware specifically to stream games and have to pay the bandwidth for it. So you want them to do this for free?

Then find a way to make it work.

Disney and others (except Warner, they're stupid) allow me to buy a movie pack with DVD, BR, AND a digital download for a little bit more than just the BR itself.

I get the movie I wanted and pay a little extra for extra conveniences. How about they say that ok, you paid $19.99 for your digital copy of the game, but for an extra $4 you can play it on PS Now. Seems reasonable and I'm sure many people would appreciate the option if they don't have a PS3.

Woah. I had actually been contemplating buying a PS4, partly in anticipation of this service, and just assuming it would be a netflix-style monthly charge. This utterly reverses that - I may still bite, but not until everything is set in stone. If it's even remotely possible it'll be a nickel-n-dime clock counting exercise, I'll save my cash for a used ps3 and work through that back catalog until they come to their senses.

Don't forget part of the idea behind this is you don't need to own the system to play the game. Sure you can go buy FF XIII-2 for 17 bucks, but only if you own a PS3, without that then you also need to go pick up a used PS3 to play it for that price.

The costs involved in buying a ps3 and used ps3 games are not exactly high.

In fact, if these streaming prices stay even close to what they are now, then it would be more cost effective to buy the hw for most people than to use this...service.

It does seem like a tricky problem to solve, since there's so much variability in the time games take to finish and the way different people allocate their playtime. Any single solution I think of ends up having some game+usage cases where the price becomes exorbitant.

They will probably need to provide several different options. - Pay per hour - Pay for some number of days or weeks - Monthly subscription to the whole service - Some combinations of the above

The average price that someone pays to stream a game should be targeted lower than the retail price of the game. First, of course, because you won't own the game. Second, because unless they've developed some kind of magical latency-conquering technology, streaming will be an inferior experience.